Every website in the world now has a switch that removes it from Google's AI answers. Google added a note to its documentation confirming it: "As of August 31, 2026, we've rolled out this control to all websites worldwide." (Search Engine Land)
The switch is real, it is free, and for most businesses reading this it is the wrong lever to pull. Here is what it does, and why the people it was built for are not most of you.
What the control actually does
It lives in Search Console, under Settings, and it works at the property level. Turn it on and your site is excluded from AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI Overviews in Discover, both as a visible link and as grounding, meaning the model can no longer draw on your pages to compose an answer. (Relevant Audience)
Google's own framing has three parts worth reading closely:
- Sites that opt out "will not receive traffic or impressions" from those features.
- The setting is not used as a ranking signal for ordinary search results.
- It does nothing to AI training. That is a separate control, Google-Extended, and turning one does not touch the other.
It is also all or nothing. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has given Google until March 2027 to introduce page level controls, so today you cannot keep your product pages in and your archive out. It is the whole site or none of it.
Who it was built for
The control exists because of regulators, not because site owners asked nicely. Google made the concession in June, on the same day the CMA instructed it to give publishers a way to stop their content feeding its AI features. The European Commission has since sent publishers a questionnaire, reported at the start of September, asking whether they intend to use it and what is shaping that decision, because Brussels wants to know whether leaving costs a publisher its ordinary rankings. (Resultsense, Android Headlines)
That is a publisher's problem. For a news site, the article is the product. An AI summary of it can replace the visit, and the visit is where the ad revenue lived. Opting out is a defensible trade for them.
Why the same trade runs backwards for most businesses
For a clinic, a law firm, a B2B supplier or a studio, the page is not the product. The page exists so that someone, human or machine, picks you. When an AI answer names your firm in response to a buyer's question, that is not traffic stolen from you. That is the outcome the page was written to produce.
Opt out and you lose that outcome, and you lose the only Google instrument that shows whether it is happening. The new generative AI report in Search Console shows impressions from exactly these surfaces. Opted out, there is nothing left for it to count. The report already carries no click data, so you would be trading a partial view for none.
Our own page on how to appear in Google AI Mode argues that broad, clear topic coverage is what gets a site into these answers. This control is the mirror image of that work: one checkbox that undoes all of it, for the whole property, until page level controls arrive.
What to do this week
Open Search Console and confirm the setting is off. It is a new control, and a decision this size should be made on purpose, not discovered later.
If you run an ad-supported publication, it is a genuine decision and the EU questionnaire is asking the right questions. If your website exists to get you hired, bought or booked, leave it off. Being in the answer is the job.
Top comments (0)